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Click-N-Run: an Easier Future for Customers?

In February 2003, I took the train from
my home in Santa Barbara, California to the Desktop Linux Summit in
San Diego, California. I paid around $50 for a round-trip
business-class seat, which was cheaper than gas for a car, cushier
than a first-class airplane seat and equipped with AC power for my
laptop. Most of the trip was through paradise: emerald-green
farmland, red-rock canyons and suburbs bounded by enormous
mountains capped in snow.

But the most interesting part of the trip, at least for me,
was the huge industrial district that starts in the San Fernando
Valley, follows the concrete trough of the Los Angeles river
through downtown and then spreads across several hundred square
miles of Los Angeles and Orange county flatlands. Sliding past the
window are endless yards of lumber, fabricated metal and piping of
all sizes. To me, it's a living model of the computer industry's
future—one in which commodities are considered good and necessary
things.

Throughout its short history, the computer industry has
treated commodity software as undesirable stuff with low margins or
no margin at all. Yet, mature industries thrive on commodities.
Lumber and mining companies, metal fabricators and blow-molded
plastic manufacturers are all in commodity businesses. When the
software industry grows up, it will come to a new understanding of
commodity value, especially of the commodity we call free
software—that's not “free” as in beer or speech, but free as in
limestone, wood and silicon. Those are all elemental substances,
freely produced by nature. In a similar manner, free software is
produced by human nature.

It's hard to see the economic value of free software in an
industry still dominated by a giant mutant company that leverages
its monopoly position to extract 85% margins from customers who
have little choice in the matter.

I believe I witnessed the dawn of a mature software industry
at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect before I got there. The
show's planning was beset by problems. There was a communication
breakdown of some kind between groups setting up the show. Some
speakers and companies dropped out. The one thing everybody agreed
on was that the show was less about Linux than Lindows. And after I
got a chance to see what Lindows.com was up to, I decided that was
a fine thing.

If the Lindows folks succeed at their mission, which I think
they have a very good chance of doing, Linux on the Desktop (LOTD)
will finally become a reality and not merely a nearly empty hole
between servers and embedded devices, where Linux is clearly well
on the road to World Domination.

While Dell, Gateway, HP and IBM all sit on their hands and
wait for the market to scream at them to get serious about Linux
desktops, Lindows.com does the hard work of actually making the
market—not only with a cool new distribution, but with a business
model that creates a win-win market for both free and proprietary
software.

Lindows.com is the creation of Michael Robertson, the founder
and former president and CEO of MP3.com. Robertson easily could
have retired to a life of leisure and portfolio management after
selling MP3.com to Vivendi. Instead, he decided to do something no
venture capitalist would ever fund: compete straight up with
Microsoft in the operating system business.

Where others look at Microsoft's success as a problem,
Robertson sees it as pure opportunity. He's kind of twisted that
way. Here's what he told me when I interviewed him at the
show:

Right now we're watching hardware vendors duke it
out over 7% gross margins. Terrible business. Meanwhile, Microsoft
is taking all the high-margin software profits for themselves. So
you have this cutthroat business making the razor handles, and
Microsoft taking all the profits making the blades.

In the future that's going to change. The hardware companies
will partner with companies like Lindows.com, which are interested
in making the relationship work for both sides. They'll say, “Hey,
I'm willing to invest in factories and companies that will put
together PCs and market and sell and support them. But I want
partners who will get me more than just margins on the raw
hardware. Any razor blades you're selling to your customers—virus
protection, web filtering, e-mail service, whatever—I want a piece
of that.” And we're here to give that to them.

I'm not just talking “add an SKU to your on-line web
store.” We're already doing that with Walmart.com. I'm talking
about really marketing in a big way, one that relieves these big
hardware companies of their painful situation. They're all selling
a commodity, which means the leanest and meanest low-cost provider
will win. That's Dell. The other guys—the losers of today—are
going to say, “We need to change the model a little bit, by
looking for a better deal from partners with a better model for
selling what runs on their OS.”

That better model is called Click-N-Run, which is built into
LindowsOS, which is built on Debian GNU/Linux and KDE.

Think of LindowsOS as the way you would set up a computer for
maximal user convenience, if you didn't have legacy software
licensing issues to worry about. Robertson's goal is ease of use
that's plainly superior to Windows, especially when it comes to the
hard part: adding new software. That's what Click-N-Run is all
about. You want the drivers for your new HP printer? Click on the
download link and LindowsOS runs the installer, which brings up the
Konqueror browser. After that, it's a quick direction-following
exercise. Soon you're printing on your LaserJet; and thanks to the
Debian dependency model, adding the printer doesn't break something
else. Want KStars, a desktop planetarium? No sweat. Click on it,
and it's yours. GIMP? Sure. Click and run.

But those are all free software. Click-N-Run mixes
proprietary software into the same aisles. If you want
Marble Blast, that'll be $9.95 US. There's
also an annual subscription fee. What that fee buys is something
you've never had with Microsoft or Apple: a real relationship with
your OS supplier.

The old software industry model was all about manufacturing.
You make a product, release it to the supply chain and measure
success by quarterly sales results. If you have any kind of a
relationship with the final customer, it's remote and indirect. If
you seek a real relationship, it isn't always a mutual or trusting
one. Mostly you want to make sure the customer isn't using a
“pirated” copy of your product.

With Click-N-Run, the relationship goes both ways. And if
it's a trusting relationship, Lindows.com can intermediate with the
makers of the free and proprietary software it supplies. Rather
than saying “How did version 1.04 do with high-income East Coast
customers?” they can say “How many people download software in
the games category?” Or, “How many are downloading GIMP
plugins?” If 10,000 people download AbiWord and it becomes clear
that a significant number of them want AbiWord to add a feature,
maybe Lindows.com or one of its partners will fund development of
that feature, even though they won't make money on the program
itself.

My point is with Click-N-Run, Lindows.com has the means in
place to become the most customer-responsive software company in
the world, to do it in a way that finally makes software easy for
the customer and helps everybody win.

How close have they come to some ideal here? Lindows.com also
introduced a new $799 US laptop at the show that only weighs 2.9
pounds. One of the attendees called it “a sysadmin's PDA”, which
it is. But my six-year-old kid also fell in love with it. He's a
reader now and figured out Click-N-Run in about ten seconds. Then
he downloaded a bunch of games and played them on the train all the
way home. We have three platforms running in our household. Guess
which one the kid likes best now?